William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life: Bookmarked

1. The Fall and Rise of Stoner

Because writers so often toil in obscurity, and because nearly all of them believe this obscurity to be unjustified, the tale of Stoner’s resurrection has been invoked repeatedly as a literary article of faith. The saga affirms that petulant voice inside every writer, the one that insists publishing is ultimately a meritocracy, that posterity isn’t about trends or marketing budgets or hype. Dickinson sent her miniature epics to friends who regarded them as little more than strange birds. Herman Melville figured Moby Dick would be his opus magnum and was shocked when it paved his descent into oblivion. The Great Gatsby was dismissed for years as a minor work. The beat goes on.

It’s also important, and oddly inspiring, to recognize the shape John Williams was in when he wrote Stoner. As Charles Shields documents in his scrupulous new biography, The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life, he was besieged on all fronts. Although he had two novels to his name, he was barely known within the literary firmament.

His first novel, Nothing but the Night, was put out by a tiny Denver imprint run whose publisher, Alan Swallow, would become his mentor. Williams moved to Denver to help Swallow run the press and to earn a PhD at the University of Denver, where he wrote poetry and criticism. He soon came to regard his debut as an embarrassment.

His second novel, Butcher’s Crossing, came out with a major publisher, Viking, in 1959. It tracks a young Harvard dropout who travels to the Kansas outback of the 1870s and embarks on a catastrophic buffalo hunt—Cormac McCarthy by way of Emerson. The New York Times dismissed it as a failed western that “contains little excitement and moves as though hauled by a snail through a pond of molasses.” (It should be noted that the reviewer was the author of numerous pulp westerns who wrote under the pen name Clem Colt.)

By the time Williams sent off his third novel, his third marriage was imploding, his previous work was out of print, the Guggenheim Foundation had declined his application, and his poetry had been met with indifference. His agent was no more encouraging about the initial draft of Stoner. “I may be totally wrong,” Marie Rodell wrote, “but I don’t see this as a novel with high potential sale.” Most of the editors who received the book concurred. One referred to Stoner as a “pale gray character.”

There are any number of writers who might have capitulated in the face of so much bad data. Myself, for instance. Had I received such a prognosis from Rodell, I would have fired back a note along the lines of this:

Dear Marie,

Stoner is too dull, you say? That was my hunch too. Fortunately, in previous drafts I had the professor strangle his wife and bludgeon his academic rival with an original folio of The Canterbury Tales. He also decapitates a babysitter because she witnesses one of the killings. Then he abducts his daughter and they set off on a crime spree that carries them from Missouri to the Badlands of South Dakota, where he meets a Native American shaman, whom Stoner murders and eats. Would that help?

Steve

Thrilled as I am to have initiated the very unpromising subgenre of Stoner Fan Fic, my point is this: Williams’s faith never wavered. “Oh, I have no illusions that [Stoner] will be a ‘best seller’ or anything like that,” he told his agent. “The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s a good novel; in time it may even be thought of as a substantially good one.”

As this note suggests, Williams was the temperamental opposite of his fictional creation: a confident artist who obsessed over his reputation. Shields describes how Williams would camp out in a conspicuous spot in the English department every time one of his novels came out and wait for his colleagues to congratulate him. They rarely did.

Envisioning this scene, I felt a twinge a pity for Williams. But of course he was needy. Of course he had a big ego. How else would he have withstood the setbacks he suffered? How else would he have converted into creative fuel the doubts the world inflicted on him?

These doubts did not end with the publication of Stoner in 1965. The book received a few kind notices, sold a couple of thousand copies, and sank from public view. One of the indignities Williams suffered was news that the novel written by his boorish brother-in-law and published a month before his own had sold twice as many copies. As Rodell predicted, Stoner proved woefully out of step with the sensibilities of American readers.

Except that phrases such as the preceding one are complete nonsense. There is no such thing as “the sensibilities of American readers.” It’s one of those terms invented by people in publishing so that they can pretend to have some inkling of what books will sell.

There are certainly brand name authors who can be counted upon to move units, and books that enjoy massive promotional support, and books that receive glowing reviews in major venues, and books written in response to particular cultural crises. There’s no doubt, for example, that a work such as James Baldwin’s story collection, Going to Meet the Man, was bound to receive attention in 1965, given that the nation’s TV screens were awash in images of Alabama state troopers clubbing civil rights protestors. All of this helps in the short term.

But for a work of literature to endure, it has to induce a visceral emotional response in readers, the sort that convinces them other people must read the book. This sort of evangelism is essential because of the time and attention that novels demand. In this sense, Stoner enjoyed a massive advantage that nobody foresaw. Namely, that its concerns—the redemptive power of literature, pedagogic integrity, the academy as a refuge—appealed to the very people most likely to be passionate readers and influential critics.

I don’t say this to take anything away from Stoner. Williams didn’t write the book to pander to starry-eyed adjunct professors such as myself. It arose, organically, from his own preoccupations as student and teacher of literature. But it’s also true, and not entirely coincidental, that Williams was a pioneer in the world of creative writing programs, which has expanded exponentially over the past few decades.

There are now a thousand such programs in America, all of them stocked with aspiring writers who struggle to convey the pleasures of reading to disinterested undergraduates, to produce original work, and to contend with rivalries, just as William Stoner did. Most every person who enrolls in these programs has, like Stoner, used literature to access his or her own inner life. The rise of MFA culture—so frequently assailed by self-appointed by commissars of creativity—amounts to a mass movement of people who have gone in search of themselves.

The absurdities of academia have inspired a raft of comedic novels (Lucky Jim, White Noise, Moo, Straight Man). But there is also a hunger for books that portray the dignity of the academy, and celebrate the life of the mind. Such earnest motives may sound outdated in a world overrun by the protective pleasures of irony and satire. It’s also how a lot of us feel. Stoner is one of the few novels that honors our idealism.

To put it in rock and roll terms, Stoner became the Velvet Underground of novels. As Brian Eno quipped, only 10,000 people bought the band’s debut album, but all of them started bands. Very few people knew Stoner existed when it was published. But a startling number were writers and critics, and virtually all of them became passionate advocates.

The charter member of the Cult of Stoner was Irving Howe, who cited the book just a year after its publication in The New Republic. “Given the quantity of fiction published in this country each year, it seems unavoidable that most novels should be ignored and that among these a few should nonetheless be works of distinction,” Howe observed. “Stoner, a book that received very little notice upon its appearance several months ago, is, I think, such a work: serious, beautiful and affecting.” By 1973, C.P. Snow opened his review of the British edition with the question every Stonerian has posed since: “Why isn’t this book famous?”

One of the curiosities of this saga is that Williams himself had, a year earlier, won the National Book Award for Augustus, his fictional account of the life of the first Roman emperor. The American edition of Stoner went out of print anyway.

In 1981, the writer Dan Wakefield ran a long appreciation of Williams in Ploughshares, and worked tenaciously to convince another publisher to reprint Stoner. Eventually the director of the press at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville—where Williams had come to spend his final years—agreed to reprint the novel. This reissued edition was out of print by the time it was pressed into my hands, a decade later.

The pattern repeated itself. Writers continued to pen paeans, specialty booksellers couldn’t keep the novel in stock, and eventually one of them mentioned this oddity to the editor of the New York Review of Books imprint, which reissued the book in 2006. The literary historian Morris Dickstein reignited interest with a piece in the Times anointing Stoner “the perfect novel.” Soon, prominent novelists from the UK such as Colum McCann, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes were trumpeting Stoner.

If the fate of Stoner in America amounted to a series of bonfires, in Europe the book ignited a wildfire, leaping from the bestseller list of one country to the next: Germany, France, the UK, Italy, the Netherlands. It is genuinely perplexing that the story of quiet professor living in Missouri in the middle of the twentieth century would electrify European readers. I can only speculate as to why.

Perhaps in smaller countries, passionate affiliation to a literary novel goes viral more easily. Perhaps European readers found in Stoner a thrilling departure from the American image most commonly exported overseas, that of men in pursuit of glory by means of restless mayhem. Perhaps they were beguiled by a hero who rejects war in favor of a monastic devotion to medieval manuscripts. Perhaps in the quiet dignity of William Stoner they found the flickering of an American enlightenment. Whatever the case, Europeans purchased more than a million copies.

At the first book group discussion of Stoner I ever led, a former colleague of mine from Boston College appeared unexpectedly. He was an elderly professor of literature whom I had imagined as indifferent to modern novels. He sat in silence until the very end of the evening, when, with a certain hesitant ceremony, he withdrew a faded newspaper clipping from the breast pocket of his sport coat. He told us that he had been one of the few critics to review Stoner when it was first published and had dismissed the novel as arid and unoriginal, a minor work. I remember him staring at the clipping in bewilderment, as it were bloody blade that had materialized in his hand. “I can’t imagine what I was thinking,” he said softly. “I suppose I was a young man, jealous of the achievement.”

At another book group, this one large and lubricated by wine, a man stood to address the room, his cheeks a roaring red. “Why should I read about this loser?” he demanded. “He refuses to fight for his country. His marriage is a nightmare. He gets bullied around at work. He never does anything.” An awkward pall descended over the room, one broken by a second man who observed, quietly but with no less emotion, that he felt he was reading about his own life, and that William Stoner might as well have been him.

Both men were saying this, I think. It is this feeling of implication—of the novel revealing us to ourselves—that causes readers to have such extreme reactions.

Here in America, the ultimate measure of cultural relevance is the Hollywood makeover. I am duty-bound to note that a team of filmmakers was, until recently, in the midst of transforming Stoner into a major motion picture. The project has stalled, owing to accusations of sexual harassment against one of the stars. But given that the book is beloved by a number of A-list stars–including Tom Hanks and Ethan Hawke—there is little doubt Stoner will become a major motion picture eventually.

Should it come to fruition, the film will be seen by tens of millions of Americans. If even a fraction seeks out the book, Stoner will become a big deal—inasmuch as a novel can be a big deal these days—and will have completed its sojourn from cult status to mainstream adulation. William Stoner, or a camera-ready facsimile thereof, will appear at the Oscars. William Stoner will have a publicity team and an after party and a swag bag.

If you’re detecting some snark here, it’s because much of what makes a book sacred is the simple fact that readers get to make the movie. Your imagination does the work of all that labor listed in the credits. You can talk about the movie afterward with other people. But you’ve seen a different movie in a different theater, where you sat, alone with yourself.

The right filmmaker would understand this. In fact, the right filmmaker did. His name is Vernon Lott. I met him a decade ago, when I was teaching at the University of Idaho, in Moscow. Vernon, who lived nearby, asked me to appear in a documentary he was making about bad writing, of which I am a frequent practitioner and staunch advocate. After the interview, he asked if I could recommend any books of good writing. Not only did I recommend Stoner, I told him he should make his next film about it.

You know what happened next. Vernon wrote to me a couple of years later to announce that he was indeed making a documentary about Stoner. I had my doubts as to whether this would happen, given that his IMDB page listed “janitor” under the other jobs category. But Vernon did eventually show up at my house with a cameraman to record my earnest raving.

The resulting film, The Act of Becoming, is an hour long. It consists of a dozen writers and critics and editors staring into a single camera and talking about Stoner, how they discovered the book, why it became important to them. There are long shots of the prose itself, and the occasional pulsing of electronic music. At the very end of the film, Lott shows each of his subjects in the moments before our filmed interviews begin. We sit there staring into the camera, fidgeting, looking away, smiling nervously and blinking, licking our lips. These excruciating portraits fill the screen for two full minutes. They convey, rather magically, the point that every human being, if we dare to watch closely, lives in the midst of tumult.

Vernon managed to make a film that captures the artistic triumph of Stoner, which is not just that we witness the life of William Stoner, but that we witness our own.